M.T Envy, or Envy, is a 21 year old young mixed French/Indian aromantic woman.
She started writing at the age of 8, first in French, and pivoted to English in late 2022, sticking with mostly fanfictions before she had the idea for her debut novella “Shattered Fate”.
Author Links:
Threads: @mt.envy_author
Instagram: @mt.envy_author
Amazon link: a.co/d/cUKtQev
Let’s talk about your book, Shattered Fate, a queer tragic fantasy novella. What is the appeal in writing tragedy for you, and were there any tragedies (classical, modern fiction) that inspired the story?
Three works that stick with me even years after I’ve consumed them have sad or bitter-sweet endings. Sure, there’s an appeal in happy endings that can’t be denied, but making people hope until the very end, only to crush them with a heart-shattering ending is one of my favorite things in writing.
More specifically, I want to make people *feel* something and with my personal experience, I have more memories of sad feelings related to fiction than positive, happy feelings, and it’s something I want to replicate for others.
How did you go about creating a queer-normative world with Ancient Greek visuals, and what was your worldbuilding process?
Coming from the lands of fanfictions and shipping, I’ve never really tackled worlds that weren’t queer normative, even if I wasn’t conscious of that. I’ve been raised in a tolerant family (to an extent) and my own orientation is “invisible”, I don’t have any story of direct oppression to share other than sexism and fatphobia (no, not even racism) and it’s not topics I enjoy exploring anyway.
If I make my characters suffer, I want it to be for other reasons than what they are. I don’t want them to suffer in their society just because they’re gay, lesbian, trans, ace etc. So that’s for the queer-normative part.
I don’t really have a world-building process, it came as I was writing. I had a base idea for the story and the world-building came as the story was being woven and written, each bit of the worldbuilding being revealed either rises questions or hints at future works I’m working on, such as prequels.
Basically, my worldbuilding was more of a matter of leaving doors open for me to explore later on than trying to ground people in the world and the story, as atypical as it might sound.
What queer rep will readers find in Shattered Fate?
An aromantic MC, even if that’s mentioned just once and doesn’t impact the plot.
An achillean relationship between the prince and his boyfriend.
An asexual side character, even if his asexuality is mentioned only once as well, at the same time as the MC’s aromanticism.
Introduce us to your MC and tell us how you developed this character.
Fate is a kind-hearted god who loves humankind way too much for his own good. He is the little hope I have in me, the little part of me that thinks “maybe humankind doesn’t deserve to go extinct after all”, the little part that wants to believe that we are good, that we can be good.
My whole point was to create a god in sharp contrast to the rather common idea of “gods hate humans/want to punish us” but that would, in the end (spoilers?) be broken in the end, and not even because of humankind, but because of forces greater than him and events outside of his control.
Despite his divine essence, he can be perceived as human, or more like as sentient as us. If a god, the god of destiny on top of that, can see things escape his control and that it takes a toll on his mental health too, then you, a human being with no such power, can struggle too and your struggles are valid.
One of the main themes in the novella is hope – how did you balance this in a tragic fantasy? What other themes are there for readers to find?
Well, hope is important to every tragedy, I think. Make your readers hope that it can end well. Make them believe that you lied to them about it being a tragedy. And remind them in the very end that, no, not all stories end well. You will be on a rollercoaster of hope and pain all along.
When Fate realizes he can do something to stop this tragedy, hope returns to him. And then, when he realizes the curse is of another god, fury and despair are the main emotions he feels.
Fight until the very end, because if Fate had lost hope in the very beginning, there would be no story for me to tell. I’m not sure if that classifies as a theme but readers will see characters supporting each other through the tragedy unfolding in their life.
Support is important when you face hardships, whether it is romantic with Zelph and Ael, or platonic and complicated with Fate and Death.
What has been your favourite reader responses to your work so far?
That it made them tear up, obviously! I cried rewriting the ending, so if my readers tell me that they cried as well, it means I’ve succeeded in what I wanted to do.
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